Object-oriented design of a dynamic simulation for underwater robotic vehicles

An efficient simulation algorithm for an underwater robotic vehicle with a single manipulator was developed by the authors (1994) which included the hydrodynamic effects due to added mass, viscous drag, fluid acceleration, and buoyancy forces. This work has since been extended to the simulation of more general tree-structured mechanisms having star topologies with a number of different joint types while maintaining the O(N) computational complexity (N is the number of links). Using this new algorithm, this paper describes the development of a real-time dynamic simulation system for underwater robotic systems. The primary goal is the efficient implementation of this general algorithm which has been achieved with C++ through the use of object-oriented design techniques of encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism. Coupled with realistic 3D graphical models, a powerful tool results for applications ranging from control system development to on-line displays during deployment. The use of this software system has been demonstrated for a number of systems including Aquarobot, an underwater hexapod under development in Japan for seawall construction and surveying